Product Details
Hardback
120 pages
Bulfinch
Published 2005
From Publishers Weekly
Mann rose to prominence with Immediate Family, a collection of photographs of her children that some saw as emotionally direct and others found disturbingly erotic. Regardless, these photographs, and her subsequent work, demonstrate that Mann has a preternatural eye for light and composition. In this book, Mann, inspired by "a cache of glass negatives...of familiar local places," set off with her camera through the South, using eighteenth century photographic techniques to capture the "radical light of the American South," and the results are fascinating. In Georgia, a column of leaves dissipates into a luminous mist; in Virginia, a scumbled field with an empty cart in the distance suggests a test shot by Matthew Brady. Many of these photographs are startling in their intimations of violence: in the section called "Deep South," Mann depicts the thick shaft of a venerable tree with a wound-like, horizontal slash near the trunk. Mann has also included the inevitable mistakes involved with such a tricky process: indiscernible unhappy accidents and washed-out near-abstractions. This is brave but puzzling. In one of her short essays, Mann writes that the Southern dusk makes "the landscape soft and vague, as if inadequately summoned by some shiftless deity, casually neglectful of the details." A god may enjoy such prerogatives, but shouldn't artists be more mindful? Most of the 65 images here are hauntingly beautiful and offer a stunning tour of a very off-the-beaten-path part of the country.
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Photograph, Sept/Oct 2005
"A collection of soulful landscapes."
PICTURE magazine, Sept/Oct 2005
"The images are deeply arresting, mysterious, quiet, and incredibly beautiful."
FORECAST, August 2005
"A stunning collection of tritone photographs reinvents the art of landscape photography..."
New York Post, October 2, 2005
"In 'Deep South,' Mann has conjured up a breathtaking photographic elegy to the South and its dark history."
Photo-eye, Fall 2005
"Showcasing a mastery of the genre with some of her finest, most moving work to date."
Book Description
DESCRIPTION: Sally Mann remains among the most innovative, talked-about, and daring artists working with a camera today. DEEP SOUTH is a much anticipated collection of her exquisite, ethereal landscape photographs, taken in the years since she rose to international fame with her groundbreaking book Immediate Family.
The photographs in DEEP SOUTH, many produced with the 19th-century collodion process and a variety of toning techniques, capture what Mann calls the "radical light of the American South." Borrowing methods favored by early masters of landscape photography, Mann bends classic craftsmanship to serve the expressive needs of a heightened contemporary sensibility. Serendipitous technical imperfections, such as light leaks or scratches on negatives, echo the accidental, chaotic workings of time. From ghostly images of historic battlefields to painterly visions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and her native Virginia, Mann's landscape photographs transport the viewer to another time and place.
About the Author
Sally Mann is the author of Second Sight, At Twelve, Immediate Family, Still Time, and What Remains. She lives in Virginia. |
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